Q&A: Foundersuite’s “Ultimate Funding Stack” is Tailor-Made for Entrepreneurs
In this Q&A, we speak with Nathan Beckord, CEO & Co-Founder of Foundersuite, about what inspired him to create a custom-built CRM for entrepreneurs raising capital—and why it’s so much more than that. Plus, find out why Nathan would love to open a Berlin office, and advice for first-time founders’ fundraising efforts.
Can you tell us what Foundersuite does?
We make the “ultimate funding stack,” which is a set of SaaS tools that startup founders use to run their fundraising efforts and update investors.
What has the response been from founders?
Very strong — I get emails almost daily from founders who tell me they used our platform to raise capital. Since we launched in March of 2016, users have raised over $110M in seed and VC capital. We’re also getting a lot of encouraging signals from incubators and accelerators who are starting to adopt our platform.
Your background involves CFO duties at various startups. How did those experiences influence your decision to start Foundersuite?
There is a direct line from my CFO background to what we’re building here at Foundersuite. Back when I was consulting to startups as the “fractional finance guy,” I would go in and get the companies ready to raise capital. This involved building the pitch deck, the financial model, and putting together a list of target investors. I would also build a custom Excel sheet or Google doc for tracking all the conversations. These latter two activities — building the target list and managing the fundraise — were massive time sucks. We knew we could build better work flow tools.
How is your investor update tool different than other CRMs on the market?
Our CRM is a beautiful Kanban board design, purpose-built for fundraising. This includes the design, flow, structure, and many more granular details that differ from a traditional “sales CRM.”
For example, our default column titles are “Research | New | Contacted | Pitched | Due Diligence | Committed | Said No” — you wouldn’t have any due diligence component in a traditional sales CRM. Other design elements relate to the collaborative nature of fundraising. For example, you can assign owners to leads if you and your co-founder are both working your funnel. Or, you can create a custom column and invite your advisors and existing investors in to populate that column with leads from their network. It’s very powerful.
Second, the CRM sits on top of a proprietary database of 50,000+ investors. This makes building the funnel — the list of investor targets — very quick and easy.
In addition, we also feature a new Investor Updater tool. Founders use this both for their reporting to existing investors and to keep prospective investors in the loop with their progress. For example, many investors will say, “you’re too early, but I like what you’re doing and would like to keep up with your story.” Now you have a tool to do that. It’s also useful for hosting your pitch deck and tracking who views it.
Finally, we have a collection of startup docs, such as pitch decks, term sheets, models, cap tables, and so forth. It’s a complete “funding stack,” and it’s generating great results for our customers.
Your own blog has gotten some great traction. What’s your strategy behind building and cultivating an audience of entrepreneurs?
I’m a big fan of content marketing. Before launching Foundersuite, I ran a consulting business for 10 years. I wrote a blog called Seedstagecapital.com that to this day generates in-bound leads. What’s nice about content marketing is that you write something once, and (if the content is any good), it can become a perennial source of traffic and leads.
With Foundersuite, we’ve taken a somewhat broader approach. We use our blog for a lot of how-to pieces, but we also have an ongoing series called “Startup of The Week” where we profile an interesting customer, as well as “Accelerator of The Week,” where we profile new and emerging incubators and accelerators.
We also produce regular events, such as www.FundingV2.com, where we bring in prominent VCs and angels to speak and post the videos to our blog. We have some really interesting video clips up there, such as an interview with Jason Calacanis (he runs the LAUNCH conference), Gil Penchina (he runs the largest AngelList Syndicate), Tod Sacerdoti (he founded, grew and sold Brightroll to a $640M exit) and Elad Gil (super angel with stakes in Airbnb, Pinterest, Square, Stripe, etc). Really interesting stuff, IMO.
As part of your blog, you spotlight startup ecosystems in different international markets. Which market stands out the most to you right now?
Berlin. There is a special combination of factors that are all combining to make Berlin a special place for startups. You have cheap rent, tons of creative talent and engineers, and an exodus of startups from Britain after Brexit. It’s also just cool as hell there — it’s got an edge, a vibe that I think resonates with entrepreneurs. I would love to open an office there.
What aspects of running a startup do you think are most under-appreciated or unrecognized by non-founders?
Just the sheer massive level of rejection you will get — from all investors. Especially for anyone who worked at a Google or Facebook or Goldman Sachs before, where people returned your calls, it can be a shock. When you’re an unknown startup you’re simply ignored — until you’re not. But that phase can go on for years and you need a thick skin.
For example, I give a talk called at an accelerator called “Hacking Your Seed Round,” and told founders in the audience that when they’re fundraising, a 5% “hit rate” is pretty typical. In other words, you may need to talk to 100 investors to land 5 solid commitments. But this also means you’re getting rejected 95% of the time, which can be brutal.
Are there any new initiatives, product updates, or announcements coming up for Foundersuite?
We are primarily blocking and tackling on our “funding stack” and improving various components of our CRM and Updater tools. We just announced the new Investor Updater on Product Hunt and it trended to #3 for the day, which was exciting.
We also recently launched Gmail and BCC integration with our CRM, which was pretty huge — users had been clamoring for that for quite awhile.
Our roadmap includes improving the investor database and improving our new Accelerator Portal and Investor Portal, which let VCs and accelerators view their entire portfolio on one dashboard.
On a related note, we will be spending much of 2017 setting up partnerships and deals with accelerators all around the world. If you’re reading this and you’re in or run an accelerator, please get in touch.
